Kreditech closes $40m series b funding round

The big data finance company Kreditech has closed a Series B round that raised 40 million USD in primary investment from new and existing global investors.

This is the largest funding round ever for a German financial services technology company and one of the largest rounds in Germany in 2014. The lead investor is Värde Partners, a global investment manager with fund assets in excess of 8.5 billion USD. Co-lead investor is existing shareholder Blumberg Capital. Other shareholders, including Point Nine Capital, also participated in the round.

Kreditech will use the investment funds to broaden its existing product portfolio and accelerate geographical expansion. Kreditech is one of the fastest growing European tech focused financial services companies offering global online and mobile lending services based on automated big data and machine learning credit scoring. The company is growing at 80 percent per quarter with a current revenue run rate of 25 million USD.

Based on automated big data and machine learning credit scoring, Kreditech extends loans to individual customers across the globe in real-time using a fully automated credit scoring system and banking backend infrastructure. The company operates independently from credit bureaus and traditional banking infrastructure. In just 20 months, Kreditech has scored more than 1.5 million individual loans - using a current average of 15,000 data points per application.

"Kreditech is at the forefront of the rapidly changing consumer finance market and we are excited about the opportunity to invest at an early stage in the tech focused lending sector" says Rick Noel, Partner at Värde Partners.

Sebastian Diemer, Founder and CEO of Kreditech states: "We are pioneers in digital banking. Our global customers never need to wait in lines at physical bank branches nor depend on the rigid models or obsolete data of traditional credit bureaus. Kreditech enables real time banking for individuals worldwide, including the 5 billion people with no credit score."

Founded in 2012, Kreditech has grown to more than 140 employees from oveer 30 countries, managing 11 financial services products in seven countries. Its unique technology uses big data gathered from thousands of sources through real time APIs to fuel its credit scoring algorithm. The self-learning credit scoring model continuously adjusts the scoring factors to encompass and adapt to new products or new countries without any manual involvement.